Alfonz attended school in his village until fifth grade when he went to a larger school in Michalovce. He recalls his involvement in the Pioneer youth group and says that many of his group’s activities focused on botany. In the summer of 1966, Alfonz and his mother visited his grandparents who had settled in Cleveland. Upon returning home, he says his mother began making plans to emigrate. It took three years before Alfonz and his mother were finally able to leave, as they had to sell their house and receive permission from Alfonz’s father. This permission was never given, and Alfonz left the country under an assumed name. In early summer 1969, Alfonz and his mother crossed the border into Austria. They applied for a visa at the U.S. Embassy, and, while waiting, rented a suite in a guest house. Alfonz’s grandparents sponsored the pair, which facilitated the process and, after five weeks, Alfonz and his mother flew to the United States. They settled in Cleveland where his mother quickly found a job cleaning hotels. On weekends, Alfonz helped his grandmother clean offices at an oil processing plant.
Alfonz went to Hillside Middle School for eighth grade where he says studying was a struggle because he did not speak English. He communicated with a Russian language teacher and a Ukrainian student while learning English from a picture book. He says that biology and math were especially challenging subjects for him. His high school Russian teacher convinced him to study the language in college, and after taking some core courses at Tri-C Community College, Alfonz enrolled at Ohio State University. In 1976, he traveled abroad to Moscow and studied for three months at the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute. On the advice of a professor, Alfonz joined the U.S. Army Reserves as a Russian linguist; he went on active duty in 1981. In the mid-1980s, he was stationed in Munich debriefing Slovak refugees. Alfonz met his wife, Donna, at a Slovak dinner in Lakewood in 1990; the pair married in December 1991. They have three sons together. Alfonz has been involved in the Slovak community in Cleveland, attending dances and picnics and participating in organizations such as Bratislava-Cleveland Sister Cities. Today, Alfonz lives in Parma, Ohio, with his wife and children.
]]>Alfonz Sokol was born in Michalovce, eastern Slovakia, in 1956. He grew up in the village of Vel’ké Zálužie with his parents, Alfonz and Milena. His father worked in the office of a grain collection and processing facility while his mother stayed at home and raised him. Alfonz’s maternal grandfather had immigrated to the United States for economic reasons prior to WWII; his wife joined him after the War. When Alfonz was in fourth grade, his parents divorced.
Alfonz attended school in his village until fifth grade when he went to a larger school in Michalovce. He recalls his involvement in the Pioneer youth group and says that many of his group’s activities focused on botany. In the summer of 1966, Alfonz and his mother visited his grandparents who had settled in Cleveland. Upon returning home, he says his mother began making plans to emigrate. It took three years before Alfonz and his mother were finally able to leave, as they had to sell their house and receive permission from Alfonz’s father. This permission was never given, and Alfonz left the country under an assumed name. In early summer 1969, Alfonz and his mother crossed the border into Austria. They applied for a visa at the U.S. Embassy, and, while waiting, rented a suite in a guest house. Alfonz’s grandparents sponsored the pair, which facilitated the process and, after five weeks, Alfonz and his mother flew to the United States. They settled in Cleveland where his mother quickly found a job cleaning hotels. On weekends, Alfonz helped his grandmother clean offices at an oil processing plant.
Alfonz went to Hillside Middle School for eighth grade where he says studying was a struggle because he did not speak English. He communicated with a Russian language teacher and a Ukrainian student while learning English from a picture book. He says that biology and math were especially challenging subjects for him. His high school Russian teacher convinced him to study the language in college, and after taking some core courses at Tri-C Community College, Alfonz enrolled at Ohio State University. In 1976, he traveled abroad to Moscow and studied for three months at the Pushkin State Russian Language Institute. On the advice of a professor, Alfonz joined the U.S. Army Reserves as a Russian linguist; he went on active duty in 1981. In the mid-1980s, he was stationed in Munich debriefing Slovak refugees. Alfonz met his wife, Donna, at a Slovak dinner in Lakewood in 1990; the pair married in December 1991. They have three sons together. Alfonz has been involved in the Slovak community in Cleveland, attending dances and picnics and participating in organizations such as Bratislava-Cleveland Sister Cities. Today, Alfonz lives in Parma, Ohio, with his wife and children.
“My mother had to sell the house and then my father – since the divorce was pretty nasty – he didn’t want to sign papers, he needed to sign papers for me to leave Slovakia. So he actually didn’t sign the papers; I traveled to Austria and I traveled under an assumed name. Relatives lived in Bratislava, and they had already emigrated. Part of the family emigrated to Canada when, after ’68, the Canadians were taking a lot of Slovaks and Czechs. So part of the family was already in Canada, and they were related to my mother, so I guess they got the idea [for me] to assume one of their names, and we lived with them for about two weeks until I got my story straight.
And how did this make your move easier?
“Well, I don’t think it made it easier; it made it possible to travel with my mother. She traveled under her name and I traveled with my aunt.”
“You do because you need to survive. You need to be able to talk to people, and if you just speak Slovak all the time, they don’t speak Slovak in the store or Czech or Russian – now they speak Spanish – so you have to assimilate. You assimilate language-wise, but cultural-wise, that comes with the system. As you live there, you start doing what other people are doing. For my mother, she had to assimilate to the system once she bought a house, you have to cut the lawn, you have to take care of the shrubs and all that stuff. That was part of life, and with the same saying, ‘If you go Rome, you do as Romans do,’ and ‘If you go to Greece, you do as Greeks do.’ You left that life in Slovakia, and you’re surrounded by English speaking people. You still have the cultural things and you still get together with Slovaks in different organizations, but at the same time you have to live life and you have to work and make a living so you have to assimilate.”
“[We were] trying to discern – let’s say they served in the military – once we learned they served in the military, then we pursued that angle. They were already refugees at that point. If they were able to provide us with valuable information, then we could help them with getting their German visa or permit to stay in Germany, or wherever they wanted to go. If they came to us and they wanted to go to the United States, then we would debrief them and find out, and if we could help them, of course we would help them. We really weren’t interested in how they lived. What we were interested in was if they worked for the police, then we wanted to know how the police operated. If they were in the military, which most of them were, which units they served in and how did that operate. Where were the training sites and stuff like that.”
“I’m not forgetting the language, but I haven’t been there to be able to develop the language, to grow the language. Language grows and it develops. I owned a translation service for awhile, but I had to look through dictionaries all the time because I haven’t been there to develop the vocabulary. I left as a 13-year old and because I speak basic Slovak, so to speak, I can’t translate. Some people can translate, they look at it and write it down and it’s done. So it’s not a realistic goal for me to have a translation service.”
“My life in Slovakia was relatively short, so I’m more culturally developed American-wise than Slovak-wise at this point. For me, I maintain my roots so to speak by listening to Slovenské ľudové piesne [Slovak folk songs]. Now I have sons that I have dancing [with the Slovak dance troupe Lucina], so I associate with that. I was in Bratislava-Cleveland Sister Cities, but I’m an American now. I’m more American than I’m Slovak at this point.”
Andrew Hudak was born in Kecerovské Pekl’any, in the Šariš region of Slovakia, in 1928. His father (also called Andrew) owned a farm, which he had purchased after returning to Slovakia from the United States, where he had raised money working in an Iowa mine. Andrew says that growing up, he and his family ‘produced everything they ate’ and that the farm his family lived on employed ‘progressive’ agricultural methods, which his father had learned in the United States. Andrew attended elementary school in his village before being sent to Nitra to study at the Mission of the Society of the Divine Word. He returned to Kecerovské Pekl’any at the end of 1944 when the seminary was closed because of WWII. He says it was at this time that he decided not to become a priest. Following liberation, Andrew moved to the Czech border town of Aš, where he says many hundreds of Slovaks settled following the expulsion of Sudeten Germans under the Beneš Decrees. There, he helped establish The Slovak Catholic Youth Association and had a radio broadcast, called Hlas Slovenska [Voice of Slovakia]. He moved back to Podbrezová, Slovakia, after a short time having lost his job, for what Andrew says were political reasons. Again unemployed in the fall of 1947, Andrew decided to move to the United States and join his father, who had been working in Cleveland for a year already.
Andrew arrived in Cleveland on January 8, 1948. He quickly found a job at the White Sewing Machine Corporation. He says he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of Slovak activity he found in the city and subsequently established the Slovak Catholic Youth Club (later the Slovak Dramatic Club) with some of the new immigrants he met at English-language night classes. After two and a half years in his first job, Andrew bought a restaurant called the Lorain Square Lunch Room, where he worked as a chef. He became involved in property development and construction and eventually established his own travel agency, Adventure International Travel Service, which he opened a branch of in Bratislava in 1992. Andrew remained extremely active in the American Slovak community, as president of the Lakewood Slovak Civic Club for ten years and founder of two branches of the Slovak League of America, in Parma and Strongsville, Ohio. In 1982, he became president of the Slovak Garden retirement community in Florida – a position he held for fourteen and a half years. In 2002, he became head of the Cleveland Slovak Institute, an organization which aims to preserve and protect the history of Slovaks in America. Andrew is married to Sophia Beno Hudak and the couple have three children, Andrew, Paul and Steven. In 1993, Andrew became a dual citizen of Slovakia and the United States.
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Andrew Hudak was born in Kecerovské Pekl’any, in the Šariš region of Slovakia, in 1928. His father (also called Andrew) owned a farm, which he had purchased after returning to Slovakia from the United States, where he had raised money working in an Iowa mine. Andrew says that growing up, he and his family ‘produced everything they ate’ and that the farm his family lived on employed ‘progressive’ agricultural methods, which his father had learned in the United States. Andrew attended elementary school in his village before being sent to Nitra to study at the Mission of the Society of the Divine Word. He returned to Kecerovské Pekl’any at the end of 1944 when the seminary was closed because of WWII. He says it was at this time that he decided not to become a priest. Following liberation, Andrew moved to the Czech border town of Aš, where he says many hundreds of Slovaks settled following the expulsion of Sudeten Germans under the Beneš Decrees. There, he helped establish The Slovak Catholic Youth Association and had a radio broadcast, called Hlas Slovenska [Voice of Slovakia]. He moved back to Podbrezová, Slovakia, after a short time having lost his job, for what Andrew says were political reasons. Again unemployed in the fall of 1947, Andrew decided to move to the United States and join his father, who had been working in Cleveland for a year already.
Andrew arrived in Cleveland on January 8, 1948. He quickly found a job at the White Sewing Machine Corporation. He says he was pleasantly surprised by the amount of Slovak activity he found in the city and subsequently established the Slovak Catholic Youth Club (later the Slovak Dramatic Club) with some of the new immigrants he met at English-language night classes. After two and a half years in his first job, Andrew bought a restaurant called the Lorain Square Lunch Room, where he worked as a chef. He became involved in property development and construction and eventually established his own travel agency, Adventure International Travel Service, which he opened a branch of in Bratislava in 1992. Andrew remained extremely active in the American Slovak community, as president of the Lakewood Slovak Civic Club for ten years and founder of two branches of the Slovak League of America, in Parma and Strongsville, Ohio. In 1982, he became president of the Slovak Garden retirement community in Florida – a position he held for fourteen and a half years. In 2002, he became head of the Cleveland Slovak Institute, an organization which aims to preserve and protect the history of Slovaks in America. Andrew is married to Sophia Beno Hudak and the couple have three children, Andrew, Paul and Steven. In 1993, Andrew became a dual citizen of Slovakia and the United States.
“My father came from a little village in the mountains, about ten miles away from our village, there was an opal mine there, his father worked in the opal mine and almost everybody out of this village emigrated to the United States. My father, [his] two brothers beside him, almost three quarters of the village ended up here. He worked in an Iowan mine and after… Like at that time there was a system that people from a poor country come and make some money, so he could save and come home and buy a farm and a house and marry some Slovak girl and start a family. That’s what happened in my father’s case. So he married my mother, and I have three brothers and one sister, and we lived in a little village as farmers. My father was a very progressive farmer because he gained a lot of experience in America about life. In a little village, in the mountains, you don’t know nothing about it. For example, we had one of the best orchards in town – fruit orchards – and we had about 120 bee houses, which he made good money out of selling honey.”
“There was another American down there living. His name was Mr. Mišík. And he was sitting on the front of his house, on a bench, and wore American jeans pants and an American jeans jacket, like a typical American. And all those kids around him, around there, asked him how things are in America [compared to] how things are in Slovakia. And Mr. Mišík says ‘Ha! In America, they put the bull at one end of the factory and at the other end come the sausages. And they taste the sausage and if its good, fine, if it’s no good then they throw it back and the bull comes back out.’ And we kids [said] ‘Oh yeah?’ And he said ‘Oh yeah!’ So we got up in the morning and ran to see Mr. Mišík for a story.”
“I was amazingly surprised by the activities of the Slovaks in Cleveland. My father about three days later took me here to the Slovak Benedictine Abbey, because also he was a good Catholic. And I met Father Andrew Pier, who was in the same job as I have right now. And my uncle took me to the lodge, the Jednota lodge, and you know, about three or four months later I became a secretary because they were looking for some young blood looking to work. And then there was… In school, okay, at night school, I saw a lot of Slovak people – almost three quarters of the class were Slovak kids, boys and girls, so I figured well, I must do something. So I founded the Slovak Catholic Federation in America. We had about 80 members – it even still exists now, it changed its name to the Slovak Dramatic Club. We did Slovak plays, I can show you some pictures, Slovak dances, and sponsored the Slovak celebration on March 14 and the Tiso celebration, the Slovak day. And the Štefánik monument, we went down there to sing. So, our generation, us – the Slovak Republic generation – prolonged the life of the Slovaks in America for another 50 years. Because sure there were old Slovaks, but that was old, and that was dying, that was tired, you know. So we prolonged its life for 50 years.”
“Saturday morning, my aunt took me out shopping, okay. She put $350 on the table and she said ‘We’re going to go shopping, and when you get a job, you’re going to pay the money back.’ So we went shopping and I came back with a brand new suit. But she burned up everything I brought from Slovakia, she burned it up! Because you are going to bring some flies or something. Anyhow, so she bought me the suit, we came back from shopping and I thought, ‘Hmm, I’m in America two days and I owe $1,500 already!’ – at that time! So I got a job in White Sewing. He happened to give me a good job. After about six months, he gave me [the job of] timekeeper, and every time he needed help, he asked me, ‘Andy, you know any Slovak boys?’ And I got him maybe… one time there was working maybe about 40 Slovak boys at the White Sewing Machine Corporation down there. You know I got, I ended up being a timekeeper.”
“Before I became the president, there were about 120 people coming to the Slovak Day in Florida. When I was president, for 14.5 years, the highest amount I had one time was 1,200, and never less than 600, okay – people coming to the Slovak Day. So it was very successful, and the next thing you know, they are coming to [celebrate] the liberation of Slovakia. So, the people from Slovakia, they don’t really want to come to Cleveland, you know, Florida was a nice attractive thing, by the sun, by the beaches; they started coming to Florida, the ministers, the mayors and so forth. And so then I organized some groups coming to Florida and here to Cleveland. It was very successful. Then I finally one day, everything was hunky-dory, straight, I decided in 1997 to quit.”
“I keep things up the same way as it was originally founded – to preserve, protect, all the materials concerning Slovaks in America. When I come here with Joe – I appointed Joe as my assistant here, Joe Hornack, maybe one tenth of what you see was here. Everything else was in boxes, like this pile, and unsorted. So we created a lot of systems, a good filing system, we created a personality file; we have a list of maybe 600 personalities, everything, whatever was said about them, we’ve got it in a special file. Same thing on the organizations – if they’re not found in that file, I’ve got them in a big box, that’s what I’m doing right now. So now my question is here how long this can survive here as is. The abbot is here is no longer a Slovak. We have a couple of Slovaks in here, but they are not that interested in things up here. I personally believe that all this precious material belongs to Slovakia, because that’s the history of the Slovak nation is here in America, or the Slovak people. Now I’m in the process of negotiating with the Matica Slovenska, which is a cultural organization, to move some of the stuff to Slovakia, and also with the Catholic University of Ružomberok, to move some stuff. So we are in the process of that thing. They have invited me sometime in the summer time for a final meeting, so I think we are talking between now and five years that we’d start moving some of the stuff. We’ve got an okay from the abbey to move it, the only thing is finances.”
“I know that I could not have accomplished one tenth in Slovakia what I have accomplished in America. Because when I compare myself to my friends, with the same education – don’t forget, it’s a smaller country, smaller opportunity. This is a big country, if you have the guts and know how, you can move as far as you want. It’s a beautiful country. I love America.”
Bronislava (Brona) Gres was born in Liptovský Mikuláš in central Slovakia and grew up in the nearby village of Liptovské Sliače. She and her twin sister, Zuzana, lived with their mother, Anna Vesela, and their grandparents. Brona says that some aspects of her childhood were ‘tough,’ as her uncle had immigrated to the United States and her family attended church, which led to some unfair treatment at school. In 1987, Brona’s mother moved to the United States and married Zdenek Vesely, an American citizen. Although the plan was for the girls to follow shortly after, it took well over one year for Brona and Zuzana to be allowed to leave the country. Brona says that, although they had no trouble receiving visas, their passports were confiscated for awhile. They arrived in the United States in October 1988 and settled in with their mother and stepfather, who now had their younger sister, Margret, in Aurora, Illinois.
Brona says that the first few months in the United States were difficult as she was not comfortable with the English language. Brona and Zuzana received English lessons from a tutor who also helped them enroll in the local high school. In January 1989, they started as juniors in the ESL program, and the following year took regular classes as seniors and graduated.
Brona married a fellow Slovak émigré and had two children. She and her husband spoke Slovak to their children, and she regularly cooked Slovak food and kept traditional Slovak customs during the holidays. Although an American citizen, Brona says that she felt like a ‘Slovak living in America’ and she returned to Slovakia every year with her family for visits. She was closely involved in the Czechoslovak community in the Chicago area and attended get-togethers. She lived with her family in Darien, Illinois, until her death in 2014.
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Bronislava (Brona) Gres was born in Liptovský Mikuláš in central Slovakia and grew up in the nearby village of Liptovské Sliače. She and her twin sister, Zuzana, lived with their mother, Anna Vesela, and their grandparents. Brona says that some aspects of her childhood were ‘tough,’ as her uncle had immigrated to the United States and her family attended church, which led to some unfair treatment at school. In 1987, Brona’s mother moved to the United States and married Zdenek Vesely, an American citizen. Although the plan was for the girls to follow shortly after, it took well over one year for Brona and Zuzana to be allowed to leave the country. Brona says that, although they had no trouble receiving visas, their passports were confiscated for awhile. They arrived in the United States in October 1988 and settled in with their mother and stepfather, who now had their younger sister, Margret, in Aurora, Illinois.
Brona says that the first few months in the United States were difficult as she was not comfortable with the English language. Brona and Zuzana received English lessons from a tutor who also helped them enroll in the local high school. In January 1989, they started as juniors in the ESL program, and the following year took regular classes as seniors and graduated.
Brona married a fellow Slovak émigré and had two children. She and her husband spoke Slovak to their children, and she regularly cooked Slovak food and kept traditional Slovak customs during the holidays. Although an American citizen, Brona says that she felt like a ‘Slovak living in America’ and she returned to Slovakia every year with her family for visits. She was closely involved in the Czechoslovak community in the Chicago area and attended get-togethers. She lived with her family in Darien, Illinois, until her death in 2014.
“Grade school was kind of tough. It was communism, and we went to church so it was frowned upon. My uncle emigrated in 1968 and then my mom went to church, so since those two elements we had against us, it was really tough. The teachers were really tough on us, so instead of giving us a break, let’s say, because we had no father they were tougher on us, and therefore we had worse grades than other children.”
“We got a tutor. Her name was Raida. She was from Cuba, and she was from a communist country. So the city of Aurora got us a free tutor, and twice a week she came to our house or we went to the library or we went to her house and she was trying to teach us by books, by pictures – pointing and telling us ‘These are scissors; this is a camera; this is a computer.’ That’s how we started communicating, and I think it went on for about six months. She went to the mayor of Aurora and she basically got us into Waubonsie Valley High School. Because they said that we are already 18 and they cannot take us in, but she went and talked to the mayor of Aurora and the mayor of Aurora called the high school and he said ‘You have to take them.’ So they took us and we were juniors. So we went there and we got ESL teachers. For the first six months we were in a bunch of ESL classes, and then senior year we joined regular, normal history, math, English, geography – whatever classes we had to take in order to graduate, because our education back home was only three years. So they figured out how many classes we need, how many more credits we needed. So they told us what kind of classes we needed to take in order to graduate in the United States.”
“First thing I remember when we arrived in Switzerland: the airport was like ‘Wow!’ We saw bananas; we saw oranges; we saw all this under-the-table material that was in Slovakia and we were really, really shocked. And this was little boutiques only. And then we came here and we went to, let’s say, Kmart or Walmart or something like that. So to us it was like this super-duper shopping mall. My mom never went to the shopping mall; she went to these local stores only, so to us it was like, ‘Wow.’ Coming from a communist country to Kmart, it was like luxury. Like Gucci or something like that at the time. So that’s what I remember.”
“We go to all these picnics and everything, and at home we do Christmas traditions, Easter traditions. We have pictures of Slovakia, we listen to Czechoslovakian radio all the time. We, at home, only speak Slovak to my children – my husband is Slovak so we only speak Slovak at home. I cook Slovak food. We try to live like we used to live at home, but in America.”
“When you go to the Czech Republic or Slovak Republic, there is more hatred between each other. Prague people will say ‘Oh, we don’t like Slovaks,’ or Slovak people will say ‘I don’t like Czechs.’ But here I never hear anybody say that we don’t like each other. Here we are like one big community, and it’s like a brotherhood over here. If you go back home, I noticed that over there they distance themselves. They try to be… ‘We are Slovaks.’ They try to be really proud Slovaks or really proud Czechs. Here we try to help each other and over there they try to be individuals more.”
Following liberation, Eva went to work as a clerk and translator at the British Embassy in Prague. She left Czechoslovakia with the help of a guide shortly after the Communist putsch in 1948, crossing the border into West Germany, where she says she went to work for Radio Free Europe in Munich pending admittance to the United States. In 1954, she was duly granted a U.S. visa and flew to Chicago, where she has lived ever since. She wrote of her adoptive home to the Chicago Tribune in 1995: “After 40 years, Chicago is my home, my favorite city which I watched grow from a duckling into a beautiful swan. More power to it.”
]]>Eva Lutovsky was born in Vysoké Mýto, eastern Bohemia, in 1922. Her father, František, owned a flower shop, while her mother, Hana, worked as a secretary at the local courthouse. When Eva was still a toddler, her mother moved to Prague without her father and started working at the Supreme Court in the city, raising Eva on her own. Eva was sent to the capital’s English gymnázium to study, for which she says she was subsequently extremely grateful to her mother. During WWII, Eva and her mother sheltered two Jewish women active in the Czech resistance movement PVVZ (Petiční výbor Věrni zůstaneme) for 22 months in their apartment until liberation. One of the women, Heda Kaufmanová, wrote about this experience afterwards in her memoirs, entitled Léta 1938 – 1945 {The Years 1938 – 1945]. Eva says the women had to lock themselves in the bathroom when she and her mother had visitors, and that the hardest part of hiding the women was that Eva’s rations and those of her mother had to be split in half and shared amongst the four.
Following liberation, Eva went to work as a clerk and translator at the British Embassy in Prague. She left Czechoslovakia with the help of a guide shortly after the Communist putsch in 1948, crossing the border into West Germany, where she says she went to work for Radio Free Europe in Munich pending admittance to the United States. In 1954, she was duly granted a U.S. visa and flew to Chicago, where she has lived ever since. She wrote of her adoptive home to the Chicago Tribune in 1995: “After 40 years, Chicago is my home, my favorite city which I watched grow from a duckling into a beautiful swan. More power to it.”
“Prague English grammar school was I think the very best thing that happened to me in my life. Yes, I’ll tell you, if you speak English… when you speak any other language, and especially if it is one like English or like German, so many people know it, speak it, use it – you’re half a step close to them. So when I left over the border illegally, leaving Czechoslovakia, I knew English. So when they asked me ‘Do you speak English?’ I said ‘Yes, of course I do!’ And they were of course surprised, because they didn’t expect that. And that was one of the first times I started thanking and thinking of my mother; how bright, how farsighted she was, to steer me to a foreign language, because my maternal grandmother – she was not Czech, she was German, but at that time when my grandparents got married, such close, close-by intermarriages were no surprise, no nothing. The Germans were right here, and we were right next to them and they were right next to us, so the mingling was very… ‘Yeah, of course, sure, why not?’ No problems, no friction, no nothing.”
“They had to stay with us, in our home, and never move out, never even open the window when mother and I were gone to the office in the morning. They knew they cannot move because you can hear on the lower floor that somebody is walking up there. My first thing here in America, anywhere I went, I would always listen – can I hear the people from above? No you can’t, because your building is different! But you know, here we are laughing, but it wasn’t laughable. But well, we just felt, we must be lucky enough, because that means there will be four people alive after the War – my mother and I, and the two ladies we were sheltering.”
“Well, we just sat down, and first and foremost my mother said ‘I know this is my last cigarette, but I know I’ll be able to buy them easier now, so I’ll just smoke this one to celebrate.’ So my mother celebrated for all of us, because she was the smoker.”
George attended high school in the years during the Prague Spring and says that the liberalization of the times made school ‘quite exciting,’ as he and his classmates were exposed to new publications and information. He graduated a few months before the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and, although he considered leaving the country in the wake of the invasion, he decided against it as he was to begin university. George studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and graduated in 1975. He served one year in the military and began working at an architecture firm.
On February 7, 1981, George and his then-wife left the country shortly after marrying. They obtained passports and visas for a trip to Austria and eventually made their way to the United States. Although they intended to move to Los Angeles, their plans fell through and they settled in New York City. George, who had visited New York twice before on short trips, describes the city as ‘a theater stage.’ Aided by a friend, he quickly started working at an architecture firm and has worked in the industry ever since. Starting in the late 1980s, George returned to Prague each year to visit family and friends. Although he lived in Wyoming for three years and, for a short time, returned to Prague to work, he considers New York City his home. Today, George works for Grimshaw Architects and lives in Manhattan.
]]>George Hauner was born in Prague in 1949 and grew up in the Dejvice neighborhood with his parents and younger sister. His father, originally from Prague, studied architecture but worked in the finance department of the science ministry. His mother grew up in southern Bohemia and worked in a personnel department. George has fond memories of traveling to visit his maternal grandparents as a young boy. He says that because his mother’s village, Kasejovice, was liberated by American soldiers during WWII, she was sympathetic to the West and the United States in particular.
George attended high school in the years during the Prague Spring and says that the liberalization of the times made school ‘quite exciting,’ as he and his classmates were exposed to new publications and information. He graduated a few months before the Warsaw Pact invasion in August 1968 and, although he considered leaving the country in the wake of the invasion, he decided against it as he was to begin university. George studied architecture at ČVUT (Czech Technical University in Prague) and graduated in 1975. He served one year in the military and began working at an architecture firm.
On February 7, 1981, George and his then-wife left the country shortly after marrying. They obtained passports and visas for a trip to Austria and eventually made their way to the United States. Although they intended to move to Los Angeles, their plans fell through and they settled in New York City. George, who had visited New York twice before on short trips, describes the city as ‘a theater stage.’ Aided by a friend, he quickly started working at an architecture firm and has worked in the industry ever since. Starting in the late 1980s, George returned to Prague each year to visit family and friends. Although he lived in Wyoming for three years and, for a short time, returned to Prague to work, he considers New York City his home. Today, George works for Grimshaw Architects and lives in Manhattan.
“My mom, being born and growing up in this village I named [Kasejovice, in southern Bohemia], was liberated by the American army, so she was more oriented towards Americans, freedom, and I think that she quite early realized what the other side of the token will be one day. With my father it was a little bit opposite because he came up from a quite poor family and, I guess after the War, he believed in the new world, the new system, which was brought from the East, so he joined the Party until 1980. So it was a little bit of a contrast of opinions in our family.”
“In high school, I think it was quite quality and, again, a combination of the ideology and then the real subjects. We were lucky because our last year of high school was ’68, so it was very liberal and many changes took place, even in our education and the information provided. Like reading Literární noviny was mandatory, and it was quite exciting. Then we graduated and enjoyed this happy time for a few more days and it was over.”
“I would say not at the beginning, because at the beginning I could care less about architecture; I was more into sports in high school, at the end of high school when we had to make a decision where to go, what to study. But later, certainly it was a big influence and a great feeling living in Prague, and then I had the opportunity to travel abroad and visit a few other places around Europe. I was always saying ‘It’s a very, very nice place we live in, compared with other places.’”
“Like a theater stage. Some quite exciting, interesting theater stage. And lately, I’ve just realized that there is not such a place anywhere in the world. It’s so special and one has to think really hard to describe why it’s so different. I like the compactness; it’s a very prominent place in the world, being in New York City, going back or from New York City, working opportunities, quality of the offices here. And everything else: culture, people, restaurants. Just name it.”
Hana Voris was born in Písek in 1947. Her father, Ladislav, was a student in Prague at the time so, for the first 11 months of her life, Hana was raised by her mother Milly Voris and her maternal grandparents at their home in Bělčice. Following the Communist coup in 1948, Hana’s father left Czechoslovakia and settled in France, where he arranged for Milly and Hana to receive visas which allowed them to leave the country legally. Hana and Milly traveled to Paris on the Orient Express in June 1948. Hana lived in France until she was six years old and learned to speak the language thanks to two old ladies with whom the family lived and school, where she attended first grade. The Voris family came briefly to the United States in 1952 with a view to settling in New York City, but returned to France several months later when Hana’s father decided he preferred living there. In 1953, however, the Vorises again traveled to New York, where they lived for the next four years. Hana attended St. Joan of Arc School in Jackson Heights, where she says she was helped by a nun from Quebec who could communicate with her in French.
When Hana was 11 years old, the family moved to Cleveland (as her father took a job in the city). She says it was at this time that she and her parents became particularly active in Sokol. The Vorises settled in a Czech neighborhood around the city’s 131st Street and, for two years, Hana attended Holy Family School in Parma, Ohio. After graduating from Catholic high school, Hana attended Case Western Reserve University, where she studied French and Russian. In 1968, she spent time studying abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she says she was caught up in the French riots in May which were particularly violent in the Latin Quarter, where she lived. Later that summer, she traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit her family there.
Hana frequently returned to Czechoslovakia thereafter, and spent five years in Prague following the Velvet Revolution. She worked in the city as an English teacher for Český Telecom. She returned to Cleveland when her father passed away and now works teaching English as a second language to refugees in the city. Today, Hana lives with her mother, Milly, in South Euclid, Ohio.
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Hana Voris was born in Písek in 1947. Her father, Ladislav, was a student in Prague at the time so, for the first 11 months of her life, Hana was raised by her mother Milly Voris and her maternal grandparents at their home in Bělčice. Following the Communist coup in 1948, Hana’s father left Czechoslovakia and settled in France, where he arranged for Milly and Hana to receive visas which allowed them to leave the country legally. Hana and Milly traveled to Paris on the Orient Express in June 1948. Hana lived in France until she was six years old and learned to speak the language thanks to two old ladies with whom the family lived and school, where she attended first grade. The Voris family came briefly to the United States in 1952 with a view to settling in New York City, but returned to France several months later when Hana’s father decided he preferred living there. In 1953, however, the Vorises again traveled to New York, where they lived for the next four years. Hana attended St. Joan of Arc School in Jackson Heights, where she says she was helped by a nun from Quebec who could communicate with her in French.
When Hana was 11 years old, the family moved to Cleveland (as her father took a job in the city). She says it was at this time that she and her parents became particularly active in Sokol. The Vorises settled in a Czech neighborhood around the city’s 131st Street and, for two years, Hana attended Holy Family School in Parma, Ohio. After graduating from Catholic high school, Hana attended Case Western Reserve University, where she studied French and Russian. In 1968, she spent time studying abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she says she was caught up in the French riots in May which were particularly violent in the Latin Quarter, where she lived. Later that summer, she traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit her family there.
Hana frequently returned to Czechoslovakia thereafter, and spent five years in Prague following the Velvet Revolution. She worked in the city as an English teacher for Český Telecom. She returned to Cleveland when her father passed away and now works teaching English as a second language to refugees in the city. Today, Hana lives with her mother, Milly, in South Euclid, Ohio.
“I don’t think our family really assimilated very well, as a whole, because all our friends were Czech and a lot of times if I wanted to do something I wasn’t permitted to do it because it wasn’t something that we did. So that kept me separated from everybody else a little bit. And I think it stayed with me through most of my formative years, this not feeling quite with… being apart, always being on the fringes rather than being in the in-crowd, as they say.”
What sort of things would you not be permitted to do?
“Like a sleepover. I mean, my parents didn’t understand sleepovers, for what? And other things with the kids, you know. So I was always sort of kept apart.”
“That whole, that East 131st, there were the bakers, the butchers, and when my grandmother visited us in 1964, it was great because whatever store she would go into, not everybody, but there was always someone who could speak Czech. My mother got the job at the bank because she spoke Czech. We walked to the Sokol, and my parents were very active in the Sokol and we were there at least four nights a week, always either my mother or somebody was there, though my father didn’t… Did he gym back then? Okay, he gymned back then but then he was more of a meeting person than really a gymnast, but I basically grew up in a Sokol, which was nice.”
“I never felt I was Czech-Czech, because I didn’t grow up there. So, I was visiting, but because I spoke Czech, I fell in. But I had the same feeling when I went back to France, because I did speak French and so I wasn’t quite the foreigner, because I was able to understand and communicate and function. And because France was a lot more similar to the States and the way I had lived here, so I could say I was almost more comfortable in France than I was in Czechoslovakia at that time.”
“I personally think that my father probably would have done better financially if he had stayed in Europe. Because he worked with an attitude of a European – you stay with one company for 30 years, retire, instead of changing companies and financially making those big leaps. Even though he was a very hard worker, I think he could have done better.”
Ingrid arrived in Chicago in March 1952. She first attended Epiphany Grade School, where she says the nuns were sympathetic and helped her learn English, and then Lourdes High School, where she did well academically. Upon graduation, she started working at Continental Bank downtown and studied accounting at DePaul University at night. She did not finish her degree, but says the accounting classes she took subsequently helped her with her business career. She continued to live with her aunt and uncle and, after years of speaking German in Vienna, re-learned Czech from them at home. Ingrid says she perfected her Czech by going to the cinema to watch old movies with her aunt. In 1963, she married Miroslav Chybik, whom she had known for five years and whom she had originally met at a series of Czech community dances in Chicago. The couple went on to have three daughters.
Ingrid says she became involved in a number of Czech and Slovak cultural groups in Chicago, and remains active in these societies to this day. She was president of the First Czechoslovak Garden Club of America until the end of 2010 and served as a long-term member of the United Moravian Societies. She has taken her children to Vienna and the Czech Republic to meet her relatives on a number of occasions. Today, she lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, with her Czech-American husband Miroslav, whom she says she feels lucky to have married as he understands her so well.
]]>Ingrid Chybik was born in Brno, Moravia, in 1939. Her mother Hilda stayed at home and raised Ingrid and her younger brother Alfred, while her father (also called Alfred) directed a textile business. During WWII, Ingrid fell ill with diphtheria which, she says, saved both her and her brother, as they were quarantined when the nursery school they normally attended was bombed. Both of Ingrid’s parents were killed during the War and so she and her brother were taken in by relatives living in Novosedlý near Mikulov, southern Moravia. In 1946, Ingrid moved with her brother to Vienna, where the pair stayed with their grandmother. Ingrid spent six years in Vienna until she was sponsored by another aunt and uncle, Bohumil and Erna Hlavac, to come to Chicago. Ingrid says her aunt and uncle had left Czechoslovakia in 1950 when they heard that Bohumil may be arrested on charges of having collaborated with the Nazis during WWII. Such charges, says Ingrid, were ridiculous as her uncle had spent much of the War imprisoned in Mauthausen concentration camp.
Ingrid arrived in Chicago in March 1952. She first attended Epiphany Grade School, where she says the nuns were sympathetic and helped her learn English, and then Lourdes High School, where she did well academically. Upon graduation, she started working at Continental Bank downtown and studied accounting at DePaul University at night. She did not finish her degree, but says the accounting classes she took subsequently helped her with her business career. She continued to live with her aunt and uncle and, after years of speaking German in Vienna, re-learned Czech from them at home. Ingrid says she perfected her Czech by going to the cinema to watch old movies with her aunt. In 1963, she married Miroslav Chybik, whom she had known for five years and whom she had originally met at a series of Czech community dances in Chicago. The couple went on to have three daughters.
Ingrid says she became involved in a number of Czech and Slovak cultural groups in Chicago, and remains active in these societies to this day. She was president of the First Czechoslovak Garden Club of America until the end of 2010 and served as a long-term member of the United Moravian Societies. She has taken her children to Vienna and the Czech Republic to meet her relatives on a number of occasions. Today, she lives in Burr Ridge, Illinois, with her Czech-American husband Miroslav, whom she says she feels lucky to have married as he understands her so well.
“I remember during the War, and I especially remember when I had diphtheria and I was in the hospital, and every time the bombers came they put us under the beds if they did not have the time to take us down to the cellar. So, we sort of escaped the War in that respect, because we were in nursery school, my brother and I, but because I had diphtheria, he was quarantined, so he could not be in school with the other children, and at that time a bomb hit the school building and all the children there did not make it, you know.”
“It was very lonesome, because I had my brother since our parents died, you know, always we were together and I had my girlfriends in Vienna at that point, and when I came here I had to just put everything behind me and… I learned most of my Czech here, because my aunt and uncle spoke Czech amongst themselves and so I learned Czech by being nosy! I wanted to know what was being said.”
“I remember I came at the age of 12 basically by myself; they put me on the ship and, you know, I came on the ship to America. And in New York, a lady was meeting me, and she spoke Czech. But she soon realized that my Czech was not all that good. So then a different lady came to meet up the next day. But you know I thought my aunt and uncle would come to meet me in New York, but I guess financially they could not do it so, I ended up – they sent me to a convent where the sisters were, and you know, all the time I was on the ship coming here I was happy-go-lucky, but when I came to New York, and I expected to be met by my aunt and uncle and they weren’t there, I just – I didn’t let anybody know but – I was so sad, you know? What’s going to happen to me now that I’m here?
“I felt safe enough, but I was just so… You know, you’re 12 years old and you have a sort of a straight plan that this is how it’s going to be. And then you come to New York and, okay, they picked me up here, and then that other lady explained to me that in two-three days I was going to go to Chicago. They bought me new clothes in New York which was very… I was thrilled, because after the War there wasn’t – we didn’t really have anything. So I got a nice new coat, new shoes and a new dress and new this. So I was thrilled to see that but when they put me on the airplane coming to Chicago, that was really, I mean, wow!
“And then I came to Chicago in March, March 3 or 4, 1952; my aunt and uncle were meeting me there so, I had met them in Vienna and I had known them since I was little in Brno. So I knew who they were and all that, so I came here and first thing I was very disappointed because there was dirty snow all over, and I didn’t see any tall buildings in Chicago, because Midway Airport…you don’t see any tall buildings there! So it was totally different from what I expected America to look like.”
“We came to Vienna and we saw the buildings all bombed out, and there were parts of the concrete all hanging there – not concrete, the plaster on the buildings – and it was totally, you know… And at that point we didn’t even know, because we… I was born in ’39 and you know, all I remembered was bombs hitting and Russian soldiers coming by and then the American soldiers came by and you know I just… We didn’t know what it was because nobody explained things to us. We were just in our own little world as long as somebody took care of us. I was six years old when I came to Vienna and then during the next six years I started school and you know… Until I came here and I think then I sort of started realizing more that, okay, this is not how life goes on, you know? That bombs don’t always fall and, you know, I’ve been very fortunate and happy to be here.”
“I think that people are more spread out, because you know before people lived close-by. I belong to the First Czechoslovak Garden Club of America and that was established in 1935, and the last two years I was president of it, but none of those people speak Czech as well as I do. And I’m not the best, but I can communicate in Czech, you know. So, it was really interesting, because whenever there was anybody who needed something translated from English to Czech I could do it.”
Jerry left Czechoslovakia just after the Communist takeover in March 1948, during the first few weeks of his military service which he was summoned to do in Sokolov, near the West German border. Jerry says that he and a friend asked for leave to visit the dentist and in fact took a train to the border, which they crossed overnight. After a few days at a refugee camp in Regensburg, Jerry was sent to France, where he gained a job in a steel factory near Nancy after being turned down in his bid to become a farm hand. He says that work at the factory was hard, and that laborers were undernourished; he once got in trouble for stealing cherries from a nearby orchard in a bid to assuage his hunger. Jerry decided to flee the factory and apply for a visa to the United States; he could only do this by returning to Germany, which he did after a stint working in construction in Luxembourg.
Jerry says that back in Germany, however, he was told at the American Consulate that his chances of getting to the United States were slim. He opted to emigrate to Australia instead and arrived in Sydney in December 1950. His first job was in Melbourne, at a factory owned by Heinz, where he made ketchup and tomato soup. After nine years in Melbourne Jerry was sponsored by his old scouting contact Mr. Beebe to come to Madison, Wisconsin. He spent a short time working in a hospital kitchen in the city before coming to Chicago, where some of his acquaintances told him he would receive better pay. Jerry has lived in the western suburbs of Chicago ever since. Over the years he has become involved in a number of Czech organizations in the city, including the Czechoslovak National Council of America. He has presented the Czechoslovak Radio Hour on Chicago’s WCEV every Sunday for almost the past 30 years. He has two children.
]]>Jerry Jirak was born in Prague. His parents owned a restaurant and tavern in the city’s Old Town, which the Jirak family lived above. Jerry’s father died when he was four, and his mother died 12 years later, leaving Jerry and his sister Alena to fend for themselves. Jerry says that his sister became a seamstress while he worked as a waiter in Prague’s Café Fenix among other locations. During WWII, Jerry studied at hotel school in Prague. He says he learned 850 words of basic English as part of his training. An enthusiastic Boy Scout as a child, Jerry became involved in the movement again after it was reestablished in liberated Czechoslovakia in 1945. He worked at the movement’s headquarters in Prague and traveled to France in 1947 to attend the annual Scouting Jamboree. It was at this event that he got to know Clarence Beebe, the head of the Scouts’ Drum and Bugle Corps in Madison, Wisconsin. Twelve years later, Mr. Beebe was to become Jerry’s sponsor to the United States.
Jerry left Czechoslovakia just after the Communist takeover in March 1948, during the first few weeks of his military service which he was summoned to do in Sokolov, near the West German border. Jerry says that he and a friend asked for leave to visit the dentist and in fact took a train to the border, which they crossed overnight. After a few days at a refugee camp in Regensburg, Jerry was sent to France, where he gained a job in a steel factory near Nancy after being turned down in his bid to become a farm hand. He says that work at the factory was hard, and that laborers were undernourished; he once got in trouble for stealing cherries from a nearby orchard in a bid to assuage his hunger. Jerry decided to flee the factory and apply for a visa to the United States; he could only do this by returning to Germany, which he did after a stint working in construction in Luxembourg.
Jerry says that back in Germany, however, he was told at the American Consulate that his chances of getting to the United States were slim. He opted to emigrate to Australia instead and arrived in Sydney in December 1950. His first job was in Melbourne, at a factory owned by Heinz, where he made ketchup and tomato soup. After nine years in Melbourne Jerry was sponsored by his old scouting contact Mr. Beebe to come to Madison, Wisconsin. He spent a short time working in a hospital kitchen in the city before coming to Chicago, where some of his acquaintances told him he would receive better pay. Jerry has lived in the western suburbs of Chicago ever since. Over the years he has become involved in a number of Czech organizations in the city, including the Czechoslovak National Council of America. He has presented the Czechoslovak Radio Hour on Chicago’s WCEV every Sunday for almost the past 30 years. He has two children.
“I went to the Boy Scouts, I was a Boy Scout since I was about 12 or 13 years old and that’s where they gave me the name Jerry. It was, in those days everything was dominated by Western culture and the Americans, and American books, and we named each other by American-sounding names which were kind of exotically attractive for us. So one guy’s name was Jim, the other was John – these were unusual names for Czechs – and they gave me the name of Jerry, I don’t know why.”
“I was able to travel for the Boy Scout Jamboree in France – that France is my fate! Of course, this time it was legal. And at the jamboree I was attracted to a musical group which we would call here a drum and bugle corps. That was a very unusual type of music we Czechs didn’t know. And we were really crazy about it. So, we went to all their performances at the jamboree and I met the executive director who was very friendly and was exchanging his address with almost anybody, including me. His name was Clarence Beebe. He was from Madison, Wisconsin, and this was Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps, at one time a very prominent and very good bugle corps in the Midwest here.”
“I was so hungry at supper, because I didn’t have no money or nothing, that I went to a local orchard where there were cherry trees. And I stuffed myself with cherries one day. And I went the second night… and until the owner caught me. The owner was threatening me that he would go to the police. So I was kind of crying to him and said ‘I’m a refugee, I’m hungry, I have nothing, please don’t take me to the police, I will pay you for what I ate from my first pay check,’ which I did. He was very gracious to me. He owned a bakery and he even gave me a job. He had a lot of stale bread and I had to make breadcrumbs out of it. Of course, that was with a manual mill, because nothing was electric there.”
“In January, that’s the high season for tomatoes. And tomatoes have to be worked right away. So they shipped these by huge trucks everyday to this factory. They had little cases of tomatoes and they put it on a belt and the belt tipped them out into water to be washed. And that’s where I was standing, to make sure that the case goes onto the other belt. And I was wet, of course, I had a big rubber apron.
“The tomatoes went back there to be worked on by the women. They were trying to get the problems out of them before they went into the machine to be worked on. It was not too bad except I was on the night shift.”
“Since I am active in my radio, I try to play music that people like, mainly folk music and brass bands and stuff like this. Of course, that applies mostly to the older Czechs. The younger Czechs, they grow [up] with American music mostly, you know. They won’t probably even listen to my radio because to them I am too old fashioned. But I have a lot of followers amongst the older Czech-Americans, and they like it because this is the only, besides their own CDs… On Sunday morning, they can have breakfast with me at 9:00.”
When Jerry’s father stopped working at the Sokol hall, he decided to buy a travel agency with the idea of assisting his peers in returning to visit Czechoslovakia; Jerry bought the business (Weber Travel) from his father in 1983. He says that this gave him the opportunity to rediscover his Czech heritage and sparked his interest in Czech history. Although he expanded the scope of the travel agency, Jerry maintained a focus on Czech and Slovak travel, and in recent years did a lot of work with people who are interested in genealogy. Jerry, building on the efforts of his father, also traced his family heritage back to the mid-1400s. Proud to have continued what his father set out to accomplish, he was always supportive of Czech organizations. Jerry lived in Willowbrook, Illinois, with his Czech-born wife until his death in 2013.
]]>Jerry Rabas was born in Pardubice, eastern Bohemia in 1945. In April 1948, Jerry’s father, Jaroslav (who was politically involved with the Agrarian Party), was warned by a friend that he was in danger of being arrested. The family, comprised of Jerry, his father, mother, Růžena, and sister Joan Zizek, left Czechoslovakia and spent 16 months in refugee camps in Germany. In August 1949, they sailed to New York City, and Jerry says that his first recollections are of this trip. The Rabas family then made their way to Chicago where Jerry’s father found a job managing a Sokol hall in the South Lawndale neighborhood. While growing up, Jerry says that his parents wanted him to participate in activities such as Czech school and community dances, but that he was more interested in sports. In high school, Jerry played basketball, football and baseball. He graduated from Roosevelt University with a degree in marketing in 1966, joined the Illinois National Guard that year and got married the following year. After finding a job at an electrical distribution company, Jerry worked his way up over the years to become manager.
When Jerry’s father stopped working at the Sokol hall, he decided to buy a travel agency with the idea of assisting his peers in returning to visit Czechoslovakia; Jerry bought the business (Weber Travel) from his father in 1983. He says that this gave him the opportunity to rediscover his Czech heritage and sparked his interest in Czech history. Although he expanded the scope of the travel agency, Jerry maintained a focus on Czech and Slovak travel, and in recent years did a lot of work with people who are interested in genealogy. Jerry, building on the efforts of his father, also traced his family heritage back to the mid-1400s. Proud to have continued what his father set out to accomplish, he was always supportive of Czech organizations. Jerry lived in Willowbrook, Illinois, with his Czech-born wife until his death in 2013.
“He was politically involved. He was very involved with the Agrární strana which is the farmers’ union political party, and they were very, very anti-communist. My mother told me the story that a good friend of his that he went to school with was on the police force in Pardubice – he turned into a communist – and the Communist Party, I believe it was on Good Friday of ’48, and they had a meeting and they were going to take over the country that Easter weekend. He came to the house late that evening and he told my dad ‘Jaroslav, your name was on the top of the list that the communists are going to come and get tomorrow. You’re going to be the first one to be arrested, and I’m telling you, they’re going to send you to Siberia and nobody’s going to hear from you again.’ So he was put under that kind of immediate pressure, that a good friend of his who was a Communist Party member came and told him – because of school friendships – he says ‘You better leave right now because they’re going to be here first thing in the morning.’”
“I was young enough where I was Americanized very early, and I didn’t even give it a thought that I wasn’t an American citizen because it was so ingrained in me from day one when we arrived here and I grew up with that. When somebody asks me if you’re American, of course I’m American. But I’ve got to stop and think, ‘Well wait a minute, I’m a naturalized citizen and I wasn’t born here.’ And that realization of what I went through didn’t really hit me until I was much older, surprisingly enough.”
Do you know how it did, or what triggered that realization?
“Well the first thing that did, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time is when I was 18, I graduated high school, I was applying to go to college, and I was denied admittance. And the letter came back and says ‘You’re not a U.S. citizen.’ So I called around and found out what was going on. We were legal aliens for all these years and I should have become a citizen by this time, and my parents had and I didn’t become one with them, so I scrambled overnight to become an American citizen – which was no problem at all – and then I did get accepted into school. That was the first realization that I felt I was being discriminated against, and I couldn’t appreciate it because I always thought I was American, it didn’t dawn upon me that I wasn’t an American citizen at the time.”
“It was anti-communist. They published a newsletter for at least 15 years called Zpravodaj, and Zpravodaj would get mailed out – and I remember my sister and I doing the folding and the postage for years, we helped them out on that – and it would get mailed out internationally and it was just an anti-communist newspaper, that’s all it was. They spoke about nationalism in the Czech Republic, they spoke about anti-communism. That organization still exists on a much smaller scale no, but it was an organization put together by the immigrants of that era, of the ’48 immigration era, that got together, had a common cause to try and gain the independence back of Czechoslovakia, and the only way you go after that, get that independence back is being very anti-communist.”
“I wasn’t as enthused about it initially, ‘Oh jeez, I’ve got to get to know these guys again,’ but after a while I really, really enjoyed reacquainting myself with some friends I knew from many years ago that I hadn’t communicated, a lot of the immigrants that I hadn’t talked to in 20 years I was able to communicate with them on a regular basis again and have them as clients and give them service, and the majority of them that I can remember came back and were very happy with the service I could give them, which I was happy to hear. So I was thrilled to be able to get back, not initially, but over time I realized that I felt proud of myself a little because what I was doing, I was carrying on what my dad wanted to do and I was able to accomplish what he initially set out.”
“I think it’s lost a little bit of its cohesiveness. Geographically at one time it was a centered community – that’s lost. That’s gone. There is no central town that can claim as a Czech community anymore. Czech stores are spread out all over the place. I’ve seen Czech restaurants go from in the 20s down to five or six, I’ve seen Czech travel agencies go from six down to one, I’ve seen bakeries go from eight or nine down to one, maybe two.”
Jozef continues to write and play music; he recently put out a CD of Slovak songs and has performed at festivals. He is active in the Slovak community in New York and especially enjoys the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. When Jozef travels back to Slovakia, he often meets with his siblings in the house their grandfather built and which Jozef has renovated. He became an American citizen in 2008 and says that the United States is where his heart is. Today he lives in New York City.
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Jozef Bil was born in Bartošovce in eastern Slovakia in 1961. He grew up with his grandparents, parents, two older sisters and an older brother. Jozef’s grandfather lived in the United States during the 1920s for about ten years and worked in the coal mines in Pennsylvania. He returned to Slovakia where he bought land and built a large farm. Jozef says that his grandfather’s stories about the United States planted a seed of emigration that stayed with him until he left Czechoslovakia in 1990. Jozef played guitar in a band for many years and says that he and his band mates often played English-language songs, even though they didn’t understand the lyrics. He attended a construction industry high school and served in the military for two years before beginning his career in construction. In 1990, shortly after the Velvet Revolution, Jozef immigrated to the United States with a friend. He lived in Pittsburgh for several years and worked in construction before moving to New York City. He became a construction supervisor and now owns a general contracting company.
Jozef continues to write and play music; he recently put out a CD of Slovak songs and has performed at festivals. He is active in the Slovak community in New York and especially enjoys the Bohemian Hall and Beer Garden in Astoria, Queens. When Jozef travels back to Slovakia, he often meets with his siblings in the house their grandfather built and which Jozef has renovated. He became an American citizen in 2008 and says that the United States is where his heart is. Today he lives in New York City.
States back in the ‘20s. He spent nine or ten years in the coal mines in Pennsylvania and he was trying to get my grandmother to come to America, but she was afraid to make the journey, so he came back. He would speak in Slovak and he would use English words; you know, you spend time in America, you kind of get confused. So he would tell me ‘Syn moj, Ty ked vyrasties len chod do Ameriky, keby si vedel ake tam maju velke buildingy.’ I’d say, ‘Ok, but what is buildingy?’ I had no clue as a child. So he explained what a building is. He just said ‘When you grow, my son, don’t stay here, just go to America. If you only saw what big buildings they have!’ Or another sentence that puzzled me was ‘If you go to America…’ Obviously he was speaking in Slovak: ‘Keby si vedel ake tam maju velke cary.’ I said ‘What the hell is cary?’ Well, he was referring to cars. So that was the idea that stuck in my mind and he kind of injected the temptation in my head. So I was growing up and I was thinking always ‘One day I am going to go there and see what America is all about.”
“As a child growing up in a small village, life was very happy, merry. The only thing we had to play with was outside, not like the children of today [with] computers and all that stuff. So we’d run with the ball, we’d play soccer and all kind of playing that kids would do outside as all kinds of after-school activities.”
Did you grow up in a house or an apartment?
“My grandfather, rest in peace, he returned from America as a rich man so he bought a lot of land. He was a big farmer; he had six horses, four cows… It was like owning a Mercedes at the time. He built a house that is still on the same property, which I fixed as a memory to him. Nobody lives there, but my sister spends summers over there and that house is a memory to all of us. I have three siblings, a brother and two sisters, so whenever I come to Slovakia we always gather there and we pull out pictures of our childhood and we’re laughing our tails off.”
“When I finished my school and started working the state-run construction industry, okresný štátny podnik as they called it. The vice-president comes to me one day and says to me ‘You are a young prospective talent; we want you in the Party,’ and I said ‘I go to church.’ And he’s like ‘So?’ ‘Well, I go to church, so I can’t serve two masters. I believe in God, so I cannot believe in Lenin or whatever.’ He had a smirk on his face. He wouldn’t bother me; he saw that he wouldn’t get me there.”
Weren’t you afraid?
“No. It was my persuasion; it was my belief. I had my education, I had my work, I wasn’t afraid of being in jail because I wasn’t a rebel, I was part of the masses that were part of the regime or ruling party, so I told them straight ‘No. Don’t even bother coming back because I’m not signing. I have no reason.’ There were cases, I know, where there were guys in the Communist Party and they were part of the church as well. So I was laughing. How can you be sitting on two chairs? I didn’t like the idea of somebody forces you into something and watching behind their back. It was just no. My answer was no.”
“I told him ‘I’m not going to settle down here because I know Czechoslovakia, Slovakia, is no place for me,’ and he was kind of upset about it because he saw other guys, 28 years old, settling down. I had a big place to build a house on and I said ‘I’m not going to waste my money and build a house because I don’t fit in here.’ As I said, that injection from my grandfather was always in the back of my mind. I want to see the world, I want to see America, and I came, I saw the light – it wasn’t easy at the beginning, but I saw the light at the end of the tunnel – and thank God I’m here, and I cannot even picture my life over there.”
“We wanted to go to the store and buy blue jeans. So I picked up the phone and I said ‘Hi Pam. Winter is coming; it’s cold outside. Could you come over and pick us up? We would like to buy a Rifle.’ Now, just to get you in the picture, Rifle was a brand of blue jeans in Slovakia and I didn’t know that blue jeans are blue jeans [in the U.S.]. It was a common thing to call blue jeans Rifles. So Pam says ‘What?’ ‘You know, it’s cold outside, we need to go out and we need to buy a Rifle.’ She says ‘Jozef, I don’t think so. It’s Sunday afternoon. I don’t think you can get a license to get a rifle.’ I said ‘A license to get a Rifle?’ She says ‘Jozef, this is America. You have to have a license to get a rifle.’ So I didn’t argue. I hung up and I tell my friend, ‘Listen, either Pam is crazy or I’m crazy. She says we need to get a license to get a Rifle.’ My friend says ‘She’s nuts. Let me see.’ So he looks up the dictionary and he says ‘Rifle. Blue jeans. Oh my God.’ So I’m calling back, ‘Pam, listen. We need to clarify something. Rifle is a brand of blue jeans in Czechoslovakia.’ We had a couple of them: Wildcat, Rifle… And she started cracking up: ‘What kind of language do you guys use in Czechoslovakia that you call blue jeans rifles?’ So whenever I pick up the phone and call her office [she says] ‘Jozef, you want to buy a rifle?’ So the language barrier and all that stuff, we’ve all been through and sometimes it’s funny how people confuse things.”
“Well, they say home is where your heart is and I believe my heart is in America. What proves that is when I’m coming back from Slovakia or travels, on my way from JFK, sitting in a taxi, I feel I am coming home. So I guess my home is here and I feel more Slovak-American because you still have feelings for the country you came from. But this country gave me the opportunity to live a better life and, yes, I’m calling it my home.”